from couriermail:

EARLY to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise, so goes the old proverb. But it seems the advice holds little truth.

Research now suggests that if you want to be the wisest, you really need to stay up – well, until 10.04pm at least.

This is supposedly the best time for a eureka moment, according to research.

And around a quarter of us feel we formulate our most cunning plans when we are burning the midnight oil, a survey of 1426 adults found.
By contrast, despite what many managers may believe, daytime in the office is not conducive to blue-sky thinking.

The afternoon, when most people are at work, is when an overwhelming 98 per cent of those polled say they feel most "uninspired".
The creativity drought just gets worse over the nine-to-five working day, hitting rock bottom at 4.33pm.
When asked about methods they use to get their creative juices flowing, 44 per cent said they took a shower.
Unfortunately for mankind, even when we do get a stroke of genius, more than half of our ideas are lost for ever.
When inspiration strikes, 58 per cent of us fail to write the idea down immediately and forget it, according to the poll conducted by hotel chain Crowne Plaza. Women were better than men at jotting down their best ideas for posterity.
A third of over-35s chose to scribble the thought on the back of their hand, perhaps having learnt from experience how forgetful they are.

The findings echo an Italian study in 2006 that found those who stay up late have the most original ideas.

Night owls came up with the most creative thoughts – perhaps because they are more likely to be unconventional and bohemian than early birds – according to the research by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

There is probably so much complicated truth behind this that I hope they study this further. It is well known that our greatest geniuses, e.g. the last Homo Universalis, Rene Descartes, never rose early and always worked through the night. There is something more behind this. Probably much more. Some theories:

• I think that it has also todo with “zen”. At night, all work is done, all is quiet and a person can analyze, build thoughts on thoughts and run a chain of thoughts without being stopped or distracted.
• It might have todo with flow and becoming into the “flow” (I have the audio book of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi)
• I think it has also todo with subconscious processes: putting someone physically next to someone else degrades performance of brain-jobs. (However it will improve things for physical compiled knowledge e.g. bicycling). Whoever invented open offices didn’t understand anything about humans. Companies who place their resources in one open space typically are dumping the remote possibility of new bright ideas or good solid plans, unless these employees work throughout the night without physical beings around them.
• To fully utilize brainpower of humans you need to put them in a place without any physical presence of other human beings, that happens at night.

Maybe some of you have noticed this at work. When you are working from home you typically generate a large amount of work in “thinking up stuff” like plannings or architectures or creative concepts. You have limitless brainpower at such stages. When you are sitting in a space with other physical human being present, no matter if everyone is quiet, it will take you much longer to progress on real creative thinking to solve puzzle pieces. Chances are you will never find that brilliant solution or concept.

However, although we live in an information society, the social pressure to be present from 07.00 to 16.00 is simply there, somehow reducing or limiting the possibilities of whatever you are working on and making it very production like and very un-entrepeneur like. I realize however that probably the largest crowd likes to be a 07.00-16.00 production-like person. Make planning, do task, fail or succeed, deliver, next planning.

Certainly you have come up with some brilliant ideas in your lifetime, which are not the ones you think yourself as brilliant but the ones which others find brilliant. I think we need to classify these moments and find out if we can mimic the circumstances, but, possibly, also the attributes of that person at that moment in time. We could possibly make some improvements on “improvement thinking”.